Chasing Your Passion? Better Make Sure You Pass It On

Every year, we celebrate Labor Day on May 1 as a way to recognize and appreciate our hard work. Perhaps some of us see the holiday as an excuse to take a rest from the toil and troubles of our daily grind. And it may serve as a necessary pause to reflect whether you’re really chasing your passion.

At Taxumo, we’re guided by our two-pronged mission: help you focus more on what you love to do, and make you worry less about taxes.

From one perspective, this is an all-too selfish promise: It only concentrates on how we can help YOU, the aspiring entrepreneur or self-employed professional.

But while it is true that the promise of alleviating your tax pains is about YOU, helping you pay your taxes also helps ALL OF US collectively progress as a society.

With more funds for the government to use, we hope to create more infrastructures and improve services for the benefit of everyone.

(Whether our government’s coffers is being used properly is another discussion altogether. But if anything, we hope that the new government inspires people to fight corruption.)

Paying taxes is a social contract. We are acknowledging our greater responsibility as part of a group.

So what about chasing your passion? Is it purely selfish? And if so, is it worth pursuing?

Is chasing your passion meaningful advice?

For the record: a lot of people say that chasing your passion is meaningless advice. (Read this. And this. And this too.)

They say one you just don’t follow your passion. You cultivate it.

Naysayers and semantics aside, we think pursuing, discovering, and enriching your passion is both sensible and sound.

But let’s be clear: chasing your passion doesn’t guarantee success.

Here’s a truth: not everyone will become successful.

We have a bias towards survivors, but forget to look at the cemetery of broken dreams, hopes, and wishes.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, argues that chance and circumstance are important factors in creating our success.

Sometimes, success is all about being at the right place and the right time. It’s not always about being the best and the brightest: a stroke of luck can set the winners and losers apart.Take the Concorde, for example: it may have been the fastest plane in existence, saving people crucial time, but circumstances simply weren’t in its favor. It was too expensive, and the sonic boom it made during flight had been such a pain that it limited its routes. (Not to mention the environmental issues it caused.)

By no means is this a discouragement for you to resolve into doing whatever job it is that you hate. On the contrary, this is more than that.

We want you to not just follow your passion. Focus on it. You should want it so badly. So feverishly that you don’t see any other course of action but to see it through.

We want you to see the opportunities that are around you, so you can go around and seize them when they come.

We at Taxumo want to help you save time so you can do other things, like network with other people, hone your craft even further, or upgrade your skills, so you can reach your full potential.Opportunity may knock, but it won’t come in unless you open the door.

But is it all about you?

Going back: is pursuing your passion all about selfish interests? Well, it can be. You can stop at that. But it’s very rare that you’ll be successful without thinking about how your passion helps others.

Doing what you love should transcend yourself, and become something much bigger than you are. It should be an opportunity for others to also discover how they can make things better for themselves and for others.

So allow us to rephrase our mission: we at Taxumo want to help you focus more on your passion–so you can spread the opportunities that you also have found yourself. If we recognize that, while hard work is important for your success, it is not the only factor that brings success to us, then we should become all the more willing to help other people to discover how they too can do what their love, discover their success, and eventually also find meaning in helping others.

Unless you think about your passion’s bigger role in the world, all those efforts will be in vain.

Let your passion also be a social contract. Make it an aspiration to make it go beyond yourself.

Author Trish Rodriguez

Trish Rodriguez is a full-time consultant at Taxumo, and also serves as an Event Director of Manila Workshops. She is passionate about entrepreneurship and helping freelancers and startups grow their businesses. You may reach her at trish@taxumo.com.